Archive for the ‘WTF’ Category
I got in my car tonight to drive home after work, and my one remaining headlight went out. Luckily, I had a new bulb in the glove compartment, since I couldn’t put it in the opposing headlight, because of the clip that fell off.
I replaced that headlight no more than two months ago. I was absolutely incensed, and yet there’s nothing I can do about it. After all, headlight bulbs don’t have any warranty on them.
Yay.
My stepsister, Elizabeth, has been accepted into the Peace Corps. I didn’t find out about it until a little more than a week ago—obviously I had known that she was trying to get in, but I hadn’t known she’d actually been accepted.
So the point that I found out she was going was just over a week ago, when I got an invitation to her going away party. So that’s nice. The only un-nice thing about it was its location, which was where my other stepsister lives, in Esperance, New York (way out there in upstate New York, about three hours from my location here in Connecticut and about two and a half from my parents’ place in Vermont). So there was a pretty hefty drive out to the party.
I went to the party in a caravan with my parents, and my sister and brother-in-law. We got out of the cars, unloaded Liz’s clothes and such, and went into the party. I happened to walk with with my brother-in-law, Dan. All in all, it was a pretty innocuous entrance. I said hello to the people that were there.
It wasn’t until later on that the strangeness started, or rather, that the news of the strangeness got to me. Apparently, Liz’s mother, who hasn’t seen me in years, saw me walking in with Dan and apparently assumed that he was my boyfriend.
I’ll repeat that, because it bears repeating.
She thought that my sister’s husband was my significant other.
I could sort of understand something like this, if it was somebody who hadn’t known me for twenty years. In fact, I’m actually quite used to people thinking that I’m gay, at least when they first meet me. It’s apparently quite common. Which, I suppose, leads me to the question that is the whole point of this entry:
Why is it that people seem to enjoy making the assumption that I’m gay?
I accept the fact that I am hardly the “typical” male. I’m not big into sports, I don’t mind talking about my feelings, I’m a performer (always a sign of the Queer), I have lots of gay friends. But the last time I checked, there’s only one thing that constitutes a gay male, and that is a desire for the same sex. And the last time I checked, I lack that qualification.
The strangest thing is that I would expect somebody who was practically family to know me the best (well, not as well as people who actually were family, but you get my point). The fact that Kathy saw me walk in with another guy and automatically made the assumption that he was my boyfriend means that she was already predisposed to thinking it. I get that this is all modern times and everything, but most people don’t think “Oh. They’re gay” when two guys walk into a room together, unless they have some reason to think so. So what is it? What is it that makes people—apparently the people that are even supposed to know me—assume that I’m batting for the other team?
I would make the suggestion that maybe this is why I haven’t had a girlfriend in forever, except for the obvious everybody-knows-this fact that women loooove gay guys.
The Christmas-themed ads have started playing on television. I can’t even begin to describe how homicidal that makes me feel.
I have a new coworker who is from England. We had a discussion about a week ago about the great game of Cricket. Being that I am American, and thus I have no clue as to what happens outside this country, I had to admit that, like most other Americans, I had no idea how the game is played.
Well, I happened to be reading my LiveJournal Friends Page tonight and happened upon an entry by a friend of mine who lives in Australia, in which he mentions that he’s got the cricket game on in the background. So I looked it up in the Holy Grail Wikipedia and, like the wealth of information that it is, it had an entry on cricket.
I can now officially say that after having read the complete rules of cricket… I still have no freaking clue on how the game is played.
What an incredibly complicated game.
Remember the flat tire I had on Monday? Tonight a headlight went out.
It wasn’t a huge deal, as I was expecting it: the other one had gone out a couple of weeks ago, and I bought them at the same time. But that’s not the bad part of the story.
The bad part of the story is that when I went to go replace it, the clip that holds the bulb in place broke off in my hand.
That makes two bad things this week. If you don’t hear from me on Friday, it’s because something worse happened… like the engine fell out.
My drive to work was interrupted by a flat tire. Nothing like changing a tire while people drive by you in the fast lane at 85 miles per hour to give you a good outlook for the week.
I guess now I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop…
http://news.com.com/2061-10804_3-5884130.html?tag=nefd.aon
From the article:
“[The] clearest reading of the pronouncement is that some unelected bureaucrats at the commission have decreeed that Americans don’t have the right to use software such as Skype or PGPfone if it doesn’t support mandatory backdoors for wiretapping.”
Excuse me? We have just as much right to protect ourselves from the government as we do from each other. The FBI doesn’t need to know what I’m sending in my emails or saying over a chat window. They’ve hated the idea of encryption that they can’t break ever since it came out, and now they’re going to try and do something about it.
The thing that I think is funny is this: What about open sourced software? If it has to have mandatory backdoors for the FBI, then wouldn’t it kind of cause problems if any ol’ person could read the code and know how the FBI does its wiretapping? It means that anybody who could read a little code would be able to tap into my communications.
Real smart.
…There Are Liberals Under My Bed!”
My brain literally did a hard crash and reboot when I saw this.
It’s nice to know that our students are learning quality stuff:
A 4th grader’s response to the question, “Name the 6 states that border Pennsylvania”.
Is that new Sprint/Nextel commercial (“because if we were all the same… it would be creepy”) really freaking anybody else out? Because I get really skeeved by it. :)